SustainableWork

I was honored to be asked to lead a panel discussion about innovation and invention at the next meeting of the Green County WI Entrepreneurs and Inventors Club.

This is an especially vibrant E&I Club. The panelists work from a wide variety of interesting and creative parts of the economy.

The meeting is Monday July 7, 2008 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. The location is the Monroe Clinic in their New Glarus Room. 515 22nd Av. Monroe, WI

Come early and have a Limburger sandwich at Baumgartners on the Monroe square. Monroe is one of my favorite WI cities and you just can't beat the environment and the economic potential of this great location.

If you have an interest in learning more, please send me an eMail

Labels: entrepreneurship, innovation, intellectual property, new product development, The slow start up movement

Today we had the biggest one day jump in oil prices in history. A couple of big economists at major banks predicted $150 or $200 per barrel oil this year.

Is this the end of the world? Of course not. Some Europeans are coming here to take driving vacations because energy is so cheap.

Is it the end of the road for inefficient, wasteful, energy intensive commerce? Yes, thankfully.

In my last startup I skimmed & recycled industrial fluids. I saw millions of gallons of oil going to waste. The industries I worked in called that oil a contaminant or pollution. They were paying to have oil hauled away. Oil. Honestly. I'm talking this century.

Long ago Buckminster Fuller said pollution is resources in the wrong places. If he knew how dysfunctional the transition would be, I'm sure he would have been shocked.

I used to give talks around the country, mostly in industrial settings. I loved speaking at the yearly industry conventions and professional education seminars for our industries.

I had to travel on the night of Sept. 11, 2001. I was giving a talk in Cleveland the next day for some of the heaviest hitters in my business. It was an awful drive. My society was seizing up. There were people waving flags on almost every bridge across 4 states. There were reports of Indiana Troopers seizing gas stations in Gary, IN for hoarding fuel as I drove past wondering where I could find the next open gas station. Weird, scary times.

During the seminar the next day, we were all politically numb but a new economic reality was in the air. The focus of every discussion was the need to protect our exposures - as a nation, as states, as industries, and as individuals.

Every single day since 9/11 more and more people have equated the idea of increasing efficiencies and cutting energy use as a way of decreasing exposures of all kinds.

Today - especially today - you can't escape the tidal wave of public support/demand behind getting all areas of our culture greener and more sustainable.

My point for this post is as follows: Think of energy use as a 'sin tax'. Something that costs you dearly for your guilty little pleasures. You'll pay more because you just gotta have it…..

Sure the revenues may not be going directly to the government as true taxes, but the money is flying out of your world as lost, not as a productive investment. You've got exposure. You're going to pay. Fix the exposure and you become safer, more productive, and more sustainable.

The idea of 'we just gotta keep to our old ways' is NOT inevitable. Good design can reduce the 'gotta'. Thoughtful, sustainable practices reduce the 'gotta'. Day by day, you reduce the 'gotta'. Day by day you get stronger, more efficient, and less exposed as an organization.

If you are an entrepreneur, or if you are an entrepreneurial company, this is a time of great opportunity to help.

I know the industrial world the best. The way we manufacture things, the way manufacturing energy is expended, the way manufacturing fluids are spent, the way manufacturing affects air quality and the overall effects of manufacturing on carbon emission issue are all significant, immediate opportunities.

Remediating these issues will only get more expensive over time, especially as inflation returns to the economy. Energy costs may dip now and then, but the upward trend is inexorable so long as we're exposed to energy insecurities.

The way to get the biggest bang for the buck is to remediate these exposures and build out new sustainable systems as fast as possible. Do the math. There's no other solution to that problem. Do it fast. Save the most. Decrease exposures and increase security immediately. Payback is forever. Duh.

There is a lot of low hanging sustainability fruit in many parts of our industrial and commercial worlds.

If you are an entrepreneur or work in an entrepreneurial enterprise, this economy is not the end of the world. You are living through a world-wide economic system change.

Thankfully there is a vast, public demand for measurable improvements in sustainable practices at every level of commerce. Thankfully you can be here to help.

We had a gentleman in town this week doing a seminar at the University for regional marketing execs. While not exactly talking about my world of commerce, his thoughts about branding any enterprise in this economy is an apt way to close.

The following quote is from Mr. Gary Hirschberg, one of the founders of the $300+ million revenue per year Stonyfield Yogurt and a well regarded business writer.

"The best brands are truly the most authentic ones. Brands that really set out to be solutions to environmental problems, water problems, energy problems, climate problems, are going to have an inherent competitive advantage, especially in a world where oil is heading for $200 a barrel."

Sustainable practices make money. Sustainable practices decrease exposures. Sustainable practices increase security.

Measurable, sustainable practices are also the greatest opportunity to build an authentic brand and to create a company that people want to do business with.

The world is changing. Change with it, my friends. Be diligent out there.

Labels: business plans, entrepreneurship, green tech, innovation, marketing, new product development

I really love these photos (click to enlarge), and their stories below.

The top photo is Ms. Chantal Dolou from Togo.

The bottom photo is Mr. Allahverdy Kuliyev from Azerbaijan.

I met them through a Christmas gift I received last year. It was a gift certificate allowing me to invest the value of the gift in loans to small, independent entrepreneurs working with the organization, Kiva.

Kiva lets you lend to specific entrepreneurs in the developing world - empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty. If you like, you get to follow the stories of these entrepreneurs and track their repayment rates. When the loans are repaid, Kiva gives you the opportunity of investing that money in other entrepreneurs.

Loan requests are small by the standards of the developed world. You can sort through Kiva's introductions to aspiring entrepreneurs on their web site. After choosing one or more, you apply the amounts you wish to loan. Your loans are aggregated with those from other Kiva sponsors. When the requested loan amount is achieved, the loan is distributed to the entrepreneur.

I've posted the stories about the entrepreneurs I chose below. I especially like the photo of Ms. Chantal Dolou. I would take Ms. Dolou to any business meeting on any continent and feel confident she would succeed. I know that look. Mr. Allahverdy has a wonderful story that engaged me immediately.

The best part of that Christmas present is the news 1 year later, that both loans are nearly 100% repaid. I will soon get to look for more great stories and wonderful ideas to support. A gift of entrepreneurship that keeps on giving!

I believe Kiva is providing the world with a great service. Like all true entrepreneurs, they have found a problem and are helping fix it. In Kiva's case, the execution of that fix is very well done.

There are many other great organizations worldwide working on micro entrepreneurship and micro finance. I'm in contact with some and receive newsletters from many. I will put up posts about these in the future.

Let's also remember that there are many micro entrepreneurs among us here. In fact, they/we are everywhere.

When you make your choices for all manner of decisions, choose to support the innovators. Choose to support hard work, diligence, vigilance, and courage.

The renaissance age of entrepreneurship is here, and it's just beginning - around the world and, hopefully, around your kitchen table.


Kiva

Ms. Chantal Dolou. Ms. DOLOU, born in 1972 in Gbodjomé in the Prefecture des Lacs in southwest Togo, is single with two (02) children and one sister in her care. She comes from a very poor family and did not have the chance to pursue thorough studies. She became involved then, by her own means, in the trade of basic need food products. To strengthen her business, she benefitted from a loan of $350, which she managed well and repaid without incident. Today, this business continues to grow and necessitates increased loan capital which is unavailable.

Mr. Allahverdy Kuliyev. Allahverdy Kuliyev has been engaged in this business since 2003. Before he rented this tea-house. Having borrowed the loan amount of $400 he bought tea-pots, chairs, tables and this tea-house. He has a lot of clients. His tea-house is a small and he wants to expand the area of his place. All in Absheron region talk about the taste of his tea. Clients have rest over a traditional cup of refreshing Azerbaijani tea in his tea-house. His tea help to people to forget about their problems. He supports to his family with this business. He is 52, married, has 3 children,

Labels: entrepreneurship, funding, innovation

A newly released paper from Harvard economist Edward Glaeser reinforces a theme regarding startups and emerging enterprises that I'm finding to be true everywhere I turn.

Professor Glaeser's paper, "Entrepreneurship and the City", was discussed in the online forum, The National Dialog on Entrepreneurship, a Kauffman Foundation site. The abstract is available from the Harvard Institute of Economic Research. I have purchased the full article, but it's not here yet. However, the abstract and NDE discussion is enough for me to make the point of this post.

While this research looked specifically at what made cities more successful, I have no doubt that the same findings can be said for any region and probably any country.

The paper concludes that it is the culture of entrepreneurship that is critical to the success of a city. Specifically, cities don't have entrepreneurial cultures by some magic stoke of good luck. They succeed because they support and educate the widest number of people who then become entrepreneurs.

Professor Glaesser finds that cities with a skilled and appropriate work force tend to have higher rates of self-employment and relatively higher proportions of small firms.

The paper also concludes that, "There is a strong connection between area-level education and entrepreneurship."

There is no mention of advanced business school training, only education leading to a "skilled and appropriate work force".

Yes. Absolutely. The culture of success is built person-by-person, startup-by-startup, new enterprises becoming small creative, valuable contributors to their cities and regions.
Does that mean all these small new entrepreneurial ventures are going to succeed? Of course it doesn't. Just the opposite. The vitally different - and better - way of asking that question is why is the idea of failure universally seen as nothing but negative by so many people?

Why can't failure be seen as the valuable learning step it can be? In successful entrepreneurial cultures, you aren't looked down upon for failing. You're looked at as someone that's working hard and could use an introduction or two, maybe a referral to a needed link in their next chain.

Now, if your failures involve lots of money and little planning, the value of that lesson is dimmer and can be hard to locate.

If you fail by losing important money in some high risk gamble, that's not failure, that's stupidity.

But if you roll out your startups following the ideas in the slow startup movement I've been writing about and you fail, congratulations! You've learned something valuable without paying much for it. You now know one small thing better than most of the population of the planet. String a few of those together, and you're gold. Nobody can catch you now. You'll know one specific set of things that virtually no one else on earth knows. If you launch your new startup by spending more time than money on it, the world of enterprise becomes an entirely different and more welcoming place.

But you need the culture of support for innovation that only comes from doing it not talking about it.

In many of the circles I travel in, I hear all kinds of supportive talk for entrepreneurship.

This week, I was fortunate enough to see this kind of culture-building support for innovation actually being done.

Was it valuable to for the entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs? There are a few metrics I could use to define success, but let's use one that should have obvious meaning. I saw a large group of people come out on a cold November night in Wisconsin, at the very same time the Green Bay Packers were playing the Dallas Cowboys (both with records of 10 and 1), to share and support their entrepreneurial ideas. Value? Hmm. I'd say.

This was an Inventor and Entrepreneur Club meeting in beautiful Juneau County, WI. Wow. The stories, the mutual support, the flat out usefulness of the entire process was really fun.

Terry Whipple coordinates the meetings. No, that's too orderly a word… Terry mobilizes the meetings. These are very peer-to-peer driven. I'm excited for their organizations. Terry and Sue Noble from the Vernon County Club, and I got to meet before, during, and after the meeting. Talk about getting it! Talking about building entrepreneurial cultures for all the right reasons.

I also came away from a recent Green County I&E club meeting with a similar sense. There are wonderful, low-cost, effective, and highly supportive ways to create a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, one person at a time.

This is new enough for a Harvard professor to be writing about it, and yet surely is as old as commerce itself.

The folks working at these grassroots levels in my state are not counting business plans and filtering them for their high tech/biotech/nanotech sex appeal. They are building cultures of entrepreneurship one person, one relationship at a time. They are building networks on networks, one network at a time.

Sue Noble told me a story about her I&E Club which almost had me in tears. I'm headed to one of their Vernon County meetings ASAP, and will post that story soon.

Professor Glaeser writes that "local entrepreneurship depends mainly on having the right kind of people". And I would suggest that to create the most efficient and widespread effects, the right kind of people would be those that are respected, supported, and trained to learn from failure and to grow in sustainable ways. That's a real culture of innovation.

Terry had posters all over the room reading 'Catch the Culture!'. I got it but didn't post it to my notebook. The next day I read about the Harvard study, stating that regions that create systems for supporting small scale entrepreneurship build successful cultures. Terry suddenly seemed smarter than he'd ever claim.

There is a tantalizing reference in Professor Glaeser's abstract for my boomer entrepreneur buddies. "Self-employment is particularly associated with abundant, older citizens and with the presence of input suppliers." Yikes. Boomer biz with lots of small operations. The research paper is ordered. Stay tuned.

I love studies that agree with me. They seem so prescient. Yet the truthfulness and the timeliness of these ground-up ideas makes perfect sense. The idea of building successful, entrepreneurial cultures from the bottom up has to be true.

Is this a knock on other kinds of enterprise creation? Of course not. Those high tech, biotech and nanotech models can be wonderful and produce spectacular results. What I do intend to say is that those models aren't the only valuable kids on the block. The entire entrepreneurship movement needs support and respect for the whole culture to grow and prosper.

This Harvard study focused on two measures of entrepreneurship: self-employment and the number of small firms. "Both of these measures correlated with urban success."

You do the numbers. Any region needs more entrepreneurs and more small enterprises to be successful. That is NOT the same as more headline grabbing this-tech or that-tech venture funded firms. It's sheer numbers. More entrepreneurs and more enterprises make the culture succeed. From this perspective, risk in the economy of our regions gets spread around and diversified, more people get to contribute, and more people become engaged solving problems. Tell me something bad about this approach.

Thanks, Harvard. More importantly, thanks Terry and Sue and all the other good folks working from the bottom up to create a culture of entrepreneurship for all of us.

To anyone considering their own startup or new enterprise, I'd say "Welcome aboard". We all need you.



Juneau County, WI Inventors and Entrepreneurs Club

Contact Vernon County, WI economic development folks to learn more.

Abstract "Entrepreneurship and the City" (October 2007). Glaeser, Edward L., Harvard Institute of Economic Research Discussion Paper No. 2140

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

The new issue of Rural Life Magazine (Winter 2007) has a very good article called "The Rise of the Rural Entrepreneur", by Candace Krebs. The subtitle is, "A 'creative economy' spurs opportunity for rural start-ups". This is a subject dear to my heart and the subject of this piece.

The article brings in author Richard Florida, a professor from Carnegie Mellon University, whose book, "The Rise of the Creative Class" did a lot to predict and identify this trend. They quote him emphasizing what seems so important to the general discussion of entrepreneurship and sustainable commerce everywhere now.

"The American dream is no longer just about money. My research and others' show another factor emerging: The new American dream is to maintain a reasonable living standard while doing work that we enjoy doing."

The ability to exercise this dream from rural areas has never been more available.

We all have skills and talents. We're all capable of making a contribution. Now the tools and techniques for interfacing with the general economy from rural communities are becoming better, cheaper, and more reliable every day.

Importantly, those of us working from small or mid-sized communities are all learning the techniques of outsourcing to one another, building strong networks of independent enterprises that, together, are much cooler and - personally - more economically secure than most vertically integrated behemoths lumbering about out there.

Can you do this successfully from a rural area? The article cites a fish broker who easily moved operations from Oregon to Nebraska. Don Macke, founder of the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship in Lincoln, NE says, "A big part of the economy has moved from people being producers to being facilitators of services".

That's largely true, and new services are emerging every day that can be done remotely. While not in a rural community, I was starting capital equipment in Johannesburg, South Africa earlier this year with little more that a modest ability to explain things over the internet.
The work force of capable people is crashing. The ability to participate, contribute, and grow your own enterprise from a beautiful, rural county has never been more feasible.

There are tough and necessary questions that need asking when the subject of rural entrepreneurship is discussed. A reliance on outsiders to solve problems seems wishful and risky. Growing our own entrepreneurs from people already in place, on the ground in rural areas seems much wiser. Developing the skills to empower those would-be entrepreneurs is vital to the larger economies of rural areas now more than ever.

I'm not going to be a mask the fact that rural life in many areas can be economically challenging. I am going to tell anyone looking to develop a new small enterprise that rural life in my state of Wisconsin is strong, vigorous, and welcoming to new ideas and new people.

According to the Rural Life article, people working in the creative occupations include such job titles as engineers, designers, artists, writers, planners, micro-production specialists, web workers, and my favorite, small scale ag entrepreneurs. I would also include everyone in a rural community that has the gumption to reach out and engage the wider world with their entrepreneurial venture.

I'm working with several new friends that specialize in economic development in the rural counties of my wonderful state. They are working hard, and working very creatively, to help you establish your new enterprise in some of the best areas to live and work in all of the United States. I think this trend is beginning to occur in most rural areas of the U.S. Their doors are open, friends, and you are welcome.

The Rural Life article included these stats about the new creative professionals: "Creative-sector workers today outnumber blue-collar workers, and the creative sector of the economy accounts for nearly half of all wage and salary income - $1.7 trillion per year."

Richard Florida concludes, and I agree; "The economy will prosper again when more Americans can do the work they love".

Yep. And it's never been easier to do work you love from a place you'd love to live.

Top that.


Resources...

Here are just a few of the beautiful rural places in my state, which are looking to have you live and work and live out your dreams. I'd highly recommend getting in touch with these folks if you would like to learn more. If you are already living in one of these places or would like to, get in touch with the folks below. You'll never launch your own enterprise without taking the first step. Just start!

Juneau County, WI. Terry Whipple has built a program to support entrepreneurship and innovation that is unmatched. All this from a beautiful rural location you'd love to live in.

Vernon County, WI. I think it's among the most beautiful rural areas in the world and don't want to see it overrun. Sue Noble and friends will help their beautiful county develop with your needs and their beautiful county in mind so please call her.

Green County, WI. This county is among Wisconsin's best kept secrets. It's a beautiful rural setting with excellent access to Chicago, Milwaukee, Rockford and Madison. Anna Schramke and her team can get you all the information you could want about starting or relocating your new enterprise in this really lovely setting. Some of my very best new startup clients are based in Green County and the support there is excellent.

Sauk County, WI. Sauk County contains some of the most beautiful rural settings in Wisconsin, yet is bustling with commercial vitality. Not only that, this wonderful Wisconsin county hosts a community baseball park known as a national gem. Call Karna Hanna to learn more.

Labels: boomers, bootstrapping, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

"Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now."

This is a quote variously attributed to Goethe, and to the Scottish mountaineer William Hutchinson Murray.

Whoever said it, good on 'ya.

It often seems like the hardest thing you can do is beginning something new. Yet the most rewarding, life-enhancing thing you can do as a human being is to begin something new, and productive in your life.

The slow startup movement solves this dilemma better than any other scenario I can imagine. I've done it myself many times and I've watched friends employ it to build wonderful new lives. Now I'm fortunate enough to be doing a slow startup once again, and watching clients not only doing them, but loving the process.

Boldness does have genius, magic and power in it. So does dreaming about, planning, and then taking those first new steps.

That's what makes the difference. Don't sweat the small stuff. Just start. You'll be better for it.

Labels: entrepreneurship, innovation, startups, The slow start up movement

I went to a business gathering last week. There were people from many types of businesses visiting for their monthly meeting.

There were about 10 people at the table I was at. As an icebreaker the host asked us to introduce ourselves to one another and tell everyone what your favorite magazine or periodical is.

As we moved around the table with these introductions, the magazine choices kept getting more financially heavy and more glacial in the entrepreneur sense. All the usual subjects, Barrons, Financial Times, stock market stuff.

I was getting a little nervous as my turn approached. I like to thumb through these and they sometimes have good, applicable stuff, but that's not the rule, at least for startup firms.

I thought about faking an interest in some dense financial journal, but couldn't bring myself to it. I blurted out, "You should see ReadyMade. These young people have got it going on. They're reusing, recycling, not buying into the same old-same old, and making the world a much better place. Not only that, they've got a rockin' web site."

My new business acquaintances nodded gravely, looked away, and after a few moments, the next guy said, "My favorite is The CFO Journal..."

I really do like ReadyMade. Their tag line is, "Instructions For Everyday Life." Another good tag line could be, "Great sources of new business ideas every month."

I quoted a cool piece from ReadyMade when I first started these posts, because I wanted to make the point that this writing was not about financial density but intelligent, good work, done in smart new ways by interesting people following their dreams.

Every issue of ReadyMade illustrates a wide variety of items that they show you how to create inexpensively. I always see several ideas in every issue that could be turned into a new enterprise.

I've got a long list of favorite magazines, to be sure, but ReadyMade is well entrenched there. I've got a secret hunch that a few of the fuddy duddies at my business table went home and asked their kids about it.

ReadMade Magazine

Labels: innovation, ReadyMade, startups

Sustainable new products and services can't be launched with the idea that you're going to put something past people.

The day and age of "you can't fool all of the people all of the time" has been with us for a long time. What's changed is the speed with which collective wisdom develops and is shared.

This works for you as a sustainable entrepreneur or new product developer. This only works against you if you're trying to game the system.

You need to fix highly definable problems for the benefit of the community you operate in commercially. You and your organization need to do this transparently and, to the best of your ability, elegantly.

I'd like to circle back to a very good book by Douglas Rushkoff, "Get Back In The Box". He concludes his introduction with, ".. we'll look at today's artificially fragmented landscape of customers, employees, and shareholders, and how this false division leads to an 'us and them' animosity. By seeing all of them, and ourselves, as part of the very same system, or even community, we break through this artificially adversarial relationship. We even start to wonder how our enterprises might actually solve real problems, rather than trying to 'create need' for our services. Answering real needs becomes the simple but astonishingly effective solution to almost every business challenge in this seemingly complex era."

If you are to be sustainable, you'll need the community you operate within. Be uber transparent and accurate with yourself and others. Define the metrics that describe success. Measure the progress you and your organization make toward solving the problems you've defined.

Especially for those of us working in sustainable new product development, the message is clear. Define the problem. Innovate solutions that honor simplicity, effectiveness and your community of stakeholders.

As Mr. Rushkoff says later in his book, "To put it simply, communities naturally build around product lines that overflow with intrinsic value. People may talk about a brilliant advertising campaign, but they will never advocate an ad the way they advocate a product they love. A company's real relationship with a customer is not communicated through the marketing, however compelling it may be. It is communicated through the cup holders in the doors, the easy-to-read LED display in the cell phone cover… Companies speak to us through the details and the quality of their products: the feeling of discovering a knob on the dashboard just where your hand happens to reach; finding a copy of the assembly instructions on the company's web site... the anticipation of one's desires feels awfully close to true love."

You need to set up your products and services so that they continuously improve your community with ever smarter, ever more sustainable solutions.

Or as Douglas Rushkoff says, "A real brand relationship is like a subscription to a path of innovation."

I like that a lot. Subscribing to a path of innovation. Sustainable solutions for the long haul.


Douglas Rushkoff's web site

First post discussing "Get Back In The Box" was Jan. 19, 2007

Labels: Douglas Rushkoff, entrepreneurship, innovation, startups

Alan Kay said “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

And now, my enterprising friend, there are companies set up to do nothing but invest in innovation.

Nathan Myhrvold is an innovation pioneer. He started guiding this field to some pretty interesting ground back in 2000. His company, Intellectual Ventures, is a platform for creating invention, and specifically intellectual property. These folks work in high tech, but Mr. Myhrvold speaks from a really unique bully pulpit for many of us, I believe.

In a recent interview in IP-Investor.com, Mr. Myhrvold talked about wanting his company to become a model for creating and supporting new innovations in many fields worldwide. “I think that the great business innovation in the first part of the 21st century is going to be this: treating inventions – and patents, as the specific legal form – as a first class asset”

He goes on, “If we’re successful, and if the world follows us – and I hope the world follows us – and 10 years from now there’s 50 of these funds or 100 of these funds, that will channel billions of dollars into the hands of inventors and inventing organizations.”

The way Intellectual Ventures is proceeding is controversial and exciting. I come out mostly on the side of IV. Read more from the links below to make up your own mind.

What’s reassuring for me is that, on the topic of innovation and invention Mr. Myhrvold, who specializes in bleeding edge high tech stuff, also holds very pragmatic, old school views about business innovation and growth. This leads me to conclude both his feet and his ideas are well grounded and that there’s hope in this direction.

One break from tradition I liked is IV’s rejection of the ‘not invented here’ syndrome. They acknowledge that the minimum time from conception to patent is about 3 years. I’ve found this to be true. For folks without IV’s deep pockets it can be much longer.

Their own in-house solution is to grow through external partners. According to Mr. Myhrvold, “So, in building our business, we realized that we were not going to be able to address a lot of our potential opportunities for such a long period of time, that it made sense to do a combination of both - doing our own invention and investing in others’ ... the other ones (are) already done. It’s a way of buying yourself five or six or 10 years into the future.”

Innovation is in the air, my friend. Everybody wants it. The world needs it. Patents are part of the Intellectual Venture story, but they are not necessary for everyone’s story. Start ups and early stagers need great ideas, but for most of us, there will never be a need for patents. (Intellectual property, yes, but that’s for another post.)

What I find really hopeful is that the entrepreneurship behind the innovation is in equal demand. If you can develop reproducible solutions to real problems, your enterprise can find support from many directions, public and private. If the Intellectual Ventures model thrives, it will be copied and reproduced and morphed across many industries and sectors of life.

The future is inevitable. Getting there is never easy, but the process is as inevitable as gravity. You’re going to work with the future or against it, but the future is going to happen.

Countless generations of hard working people sacrificed to get you to this renaissance moment of economic opportunity.

You can do it. Invent, innovate and create your future. If you can partner with others to get there faster and smarter, all the better. Just don’t miss the opportunity to act.

I wish you well.


Intellectual Ventures web site

The Dec 5, 2006 IP-Investors.com interview with Nathan Myhrvold is available in PDF format from the IV link above.

Business Week article July 3, 2006: Inside Nathan Myhrvold's Mysterious New Idea Machine

Alan Kay info on Wikipedia

Labels: funding, innovation, startups

I like Kevin Maney's tech columns in USA Today. He's a good writer and he keeps up a nice blog about tech news.

Kevin had a piece in the paper on Nov 22, 2006 that caught my eye. He was writing about Amazon.com’s new vision for entrepreneurs. Amazon is beginning to unbundle their operations so that outside organizations can now pick from many Amazon in-house capabilities and apply them to their own enterprises.

This has been done with digital products in the past, but Amazon is gearing up to let us do this with 3D stuff, using their computers and providing physical distribution as well.

The businesses I’ve started have always sold things to other organizations. It didn’t matter what kind of organizations, just that there was a structure of some kind in place. For seed stage start ups, selling to other organizations has been a far more efficient way to start enterprises than selling things to civilians. The basis for this idea is that selling directly to the public has been far more expensive, and, most importantly, much more time consuming. Most start ups do not have the time available to waste dealing with anyone who can walk through the front door.

Obviously, that ground has been shifting daily as the internet emerges. The ability to sell directly at the retail level has been growing for the big guys as well as start ups.

The ability to keep enterprises small, fast and efficient has never been easier or cheaper. Now, the ability to sell to civilians seems to be emerging with the potential to take us far beyond eBay.

What I like about this Amazon development is that (hopefully) start ups and emerging enterprises can sell to civilians in ways they never could before, by opening different kinds of front doors.

Amazon won’t be the only portal you can do this with, but they are lighting the way. This trend will enrich the entrepreneurial community worldwide.

With the Amazon model, Kevin Maney says "You can rent space on Amazon’s computers to run a business, or to rent out its transaction capabilities to sell things and collect money, or rent pieces of its warehouses and distribution system to store and ship items - or all of the above."

Maney continues, "So with almost no start up costs, anyone anywhere could become a retailer. It's not just contracting with Amazon to sell your stuff, the way Target does. It's leasing pieces of Amazon to create something totally unrelated to Amazon."

Now, my seed stage friends, initially this is probably not set up for you. As Mr. Maney quotes Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, "We can take all the things that used to be fixed cost, and let people pay by the drink." That's code for ‘this service is going to be expensive’. At first, this is probably not for seed stagers, but it’s coming.

However, it looks to me like emerging organizations with the funding could jump right in. Storage space at Amazon distribution hubs seems to be about $0.45 per cubic foot per month. I have not used the electronic interface yet, but it's reported strength is it simplicity. The new access to Amazon's computing power is priced at a rate that looks cheap to me. This will be worth exploring. If you have a tech person on your team it would seem especially alluring.

Interesting side note. As this idea catches on, it will allow Amazon and others to offer increasingly lower costs for these services. According to Jeff Bezos, interviewed at this month's Web 2.0 conference, only 17% of the capacity of Amazon's servers are used. Mr. Bezos says it's like having a Boeing 747 and leaving it parked on the runway 83% of the time.

This move by Amazon is a clear, clarion shot across the bow of the emerging entrepreneurial culture announcing that the big guns get it. They are turning their ships to serve the needs of ever smaller enterprises with an increasing array of valuable resources. Good on 'em. Thank you Mr Bezos. I hope this idea evolves well.

Business Week did a very good cover story on the Amazon rollout in it’s Nov. 13, 2006 issue. I liked a quote there from an early adopter of the Amazon offering, Chris MacAskill, a former fierce competitor of Amazon. Chris is now president of an on line photo sharing firm, who says this about the Amazon approach, "Everything we can get Amazon to do, we will get Amazon to do. You're going to see all kinds of startups get a much better and faster start" by using Amazon services.

Is it for everybody? Of course not. Is it good news for all entrepreneurs? You bet.

As for Kevin Maney, I can't leave his column without applauding some great writing celebrating this evolving story.

"What's new about Amazon is the leap to physical products. This might be one of those evolutionary milestones, like when the first fish crawled up on land, or Jimi Hendrix discovered feedback on his guitar."

My start up friends, big new evolutionary benefits are raining down on our community at an increasing rate. Many will help you and your enterprise become more sustainable. Follow those like Jimi followed his feedback loops.

Developments like those at Amazon are leading to a lot more opportunities for a lot more people.

That includes you.


Kevin Maney’s full article at USA Today

Amazon portal to learn more

Jeff Bezos interview at Web 2.0

ComputerWorld Magazine review of the Amazon project

Business Week story on Amazon

Kevin Maney's blog

Kevin Maney’s home page

Labels: innovation, marketing, platforms

I was turning wrenches with my partner Dave recently as we worked to get a recycler out the door. Normally I’m on the road peddling these devices, and it was nice to have the face time with my friend and fellow warrior.

In reminiscing about our start, Dave reminded me that 8 years ago we’d each invested a grand total of $3,000 to start our business. We now have customers on 6 continents, meaningful international awards, and a rocking business model.

The current big push for starting up enterprises typically begins with business models that require you to search for outside capital through formal business funding channels right out of the gate.

This isn't necessarily the only path to follow. Many great enterprises were created around business models that didn’t start with formal investment funding. They were started with savings or with small investments from family or friends.

My recommendation to friends starting enterprises is that it's smart to start small if you can. Start part time if you need to. There’s no shame in this at all (I put up a post about starting part time dated 5/10/05). Try to do it with your own money first. If you can’t cover all of it and if the sums are modest, you can consider small investments from people who know you. This is not the time for you and your enterprise to be courting strangers. Your seed investor(s) should only come from people who know and like you. Many start ups need more formal funding avenues. But many more do not.

If you follow this route, I’m going to suggest a method for creating sustainable investment transactions for early stagers. I call it commission venture investing. The start up model offered by commission venturing begins the repayments to your investors immediately in the form of commissions from every transaction. This creates wonderful built in feedback loops for all involved.

Diving headlong into the outside funding game is very time consuming, full of dead ends, and you can easily end up with people in your shorts you may not want there.

You’re not a bad entrepreneur if you think you can start without jumping right into the formal funding rounds. Don't accept the premise that you have to go after outside angel investors, venture capital, or state and federal grants to start an enterprise. Go try out your ideas. Test your solutions in the real world first. Learn your story. Learn to tell your story.

Get out there and make the many mistakes awaiting you. Celebrate the small victories. These will help craft the destiny of your new enterprise. Time and small scale failures are immeasurably wonderful gifts to give yourself and your start up. The creative serendipity arising from mistakes can be the most productive moments of your enterprise life. More valuable information can be learned from the gleanings of what went wrong than can ever come from happy-dancing around what went right.

However, it’s MUCH harder to work through these valuable mistakes and small victories after you’ve entered the formal business funding rounds.

If you don't have enough funds available to start, family and friends can be considered as seed funders, but only if you approach this process very carefully. The end result should be first and foremost, that after the transaction has run its course, you're still family and friends. Full transparency and full disclosure with your seed stage funders. If you can’t operate this way, stay away from your family and friends, because you don't deserve them.

Creating new enterprises with family or friends involved is an opportunity that requires strict discipline to work. Commission venture investing, with its built in immediate feedback loops, offers a scalable model that can benefit all involved.

Rather than promising repayment of the funding from profits to be earned at some future point (if your model pans out), start the payback from the first sale. By this I mean paying out an agreed upon percent of monthly revenue, not profit. Repay your funder(s) with a percent every month’s sales until everyone is made whole.

Your funder(s) see immediate results, even if small. It’s also good for your start up. Commission venture investing requires that you have a firm understanding of all your costs. If the investment payback requires that you charge more, good. At the start of your enterprise, you should be charging more anyway, I promise. Might as well include their repayment portion and get it over with. Even if your enterprise achieves toasthood, your funder(s) will have been repaid in some measure. If you make it through this investment round and everyone is paid back, you’ll be operating at a higher profitability level.

Your accounting responsibilities will require that you operate in full transparency with your funder(s). Your books will be managed by a Certified Public Accountant who is also your in house ethics committee and the core of your financial marketing program. Any intelligent investor will want the authentifications provided by a CPA.

There is also an important side benefit for the larger economy as well. Many people want to invest in entrepreneurship and innovation, but don’t feel they can for various reasons. Commission venturing allows all of us to participate down to the micro level. Funder side, enterprise side. All of it at the appropriate scale for everyone involved.

Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunas of the Grameen Bank has shown that the micro loans his organization makes creates many wonderful sustainable enterprises. Most important, those loans are paid back at rates far better than typical bank loans.

One of the main reasons is the feedback loops Mr. Yunas and The Grameen Bank build into their loan process. Often the recipients have no experience with economics at any level, so peer involvement becomes important for all involved.

In commission venturing, I see a similar feedback loop, except appropriate for the scale of the economics involved. The funder(s) have full access to your transparent books. They get regular feedback (payments) on the progress of their investment. They want you to succeed, and you’ll be working hard and smart to do so. You will also come out of your seed stage rounds with a far less complicated ownership structure that traditional venture investment models would have created.

This is not a Luddite screed against the more formal venture capital routes. On the contrary. As your enterprise grows into the 21st century, you’ll most likely need the outside resources of angels, venture folks, development orgs, etc. When you get to that level you’ll need to have documented that you have the discipline and the track record needed to execute at the next tier. By demonstrating that you’ve ventured through the seed stage with documented, successful results, you’re earning your eBay stars, and are capable of taking the next steps.

The start up game is changing fundamentally, with over the top positive news for entrepreneurs and the economies we operate in. Many terrific new support programs are now available with more appearing daily it seems.

However, don’t consider that you are shut out of the game if you can’t muster the personal or professional resources needed to start your enterprise with institutional investors. That path is important but over-hyped for many of us.

Commission venture investing can offer a more valuable scale and a more manageable model for seed stage start ups. It creates trust, and it creates returns for your funder(s) from the first transactions. It’s exciting and helpful for all involved. It invigorates the process with a sense of ownership and pride in the enterprise that makes for a great feedback loop. It also requires good discipline from you and all your business processes, especially accounting. I think commission venture investing can evolve into a new form of early stage seed funding that will benefit everyone, from the smallest ventures and the smallest investors right up through global economies.

Don’t be intimidated by the jargon of professionals talking about entrepreneurship. Their approach can quickly intimidate anyone new to the game.

Fire up your dream. Find a problem to fix and build your enterprise around your solutions.

With good planning, you can start your enterprise your way. Kitchen tables, notebooks, pencils (with LOTS of erasers) and all the low tech, small money solutions you can muster are perfectly valid tools for launching your enterprise.

Commission venture investing can work for start ups and small investors alike, especially at the early seed stages.

Go get ‘em, friend.


Mohammed Yunas, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and the wonderful Grameen Bank. You can check threir loan and payback info right from their home page. My kind of transparency. My kind of heroes.

Labels: funding, innovation

There is a great deal to like about Thomas Friedman's new book, The World Is Flat.

It's written as an historical perspective on the great forces moving societies and markets. It should also be looked at as a how-to primer on getting yourself ready to participate in the coming global economy. I highly recommend this book from the perspective of new and emerging enterprises.

Among the many quotes I've tagged for highlighting, one keeps popping to the front: "There may be a limit to the number of good factory jobs in the world, but there is no limit to the number of idea generated jobs in the world."

Friedman quotes Netscape cofounder Marc Andreesen on the subject: "If you believe human wants and needs are infinite, then there are infinite industries to be created, infinite businesses to be started, and infinite jobs to be done, and the only limiting factor is human imagination."

Andreesen continues later, "You should be afraid of free markets only if you believe that you will never need new medicines, new work flow software, new industries, new coffeehouses. Yes, it takes a leap of faith, based on economics, to say that there will be new things to do."

Thomas Friedman summarizes, "But there always have been new jobs to do, and there is no fundamental reason to believe the future will be different. Some 150 years ago, 90 percent of Americans worked in agriculture and related fields. Today it's only 3 or 4 percent. What if the government had decided to protect and subsidize all those agricultural jobs and not embrace industrialization and then computerization? Would America as a whole really be better off today? Hardly."

This post is NOT about unfettered trade with countries that are human rights thugs and environmental criminals. Our governments need to get better hold of that process, creating 21st century standards for social, environmental and production standards that meet the needs of all world citizens. Under this scenario, I firmly believe that millions of great new enterprises will arise worldwide, in both developed and developing countries.

This post is about you creating new enterprises. This post is about the valuable resource that is your imagination. You can do it. You’ll probably need to do it someday, if not for the economics of it, then for your own mental health.

There is no limit to the number of idea generated jobs that can be created. Don’t look at what’s been done. Look at what’s possible. Look at what needs fixing. Honor your own ideas and look to your future. Plan well and be ready to launch when your time comes.

I wish you good ideas.


Thomas Friedman’s web site. In 2005, The World Is Flat was given the first Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award, and Friedman was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News & World Report.

Labels: entrepreneurship, innovation, Outsourcing

Doing anything for the first time is hard and usually scary.

You don't know what's supposed to come next. Every step is a step into the unknown. You don't know the lingo. You're ready to accept any help that's offered. You make mistakes.

None of that is bad, except for one word. Any. As in "You're ready to accept any help."

Any help is no help. Specific help you target as a need to grow your own skills is good. Wading into something new and looking around to see who will help is bad, especially in the world of new enterprises.

You're thinking about going out on your own. Good. You've summoned the courage. Embrace it. You're heart is racing. I'm with you. Now stop. Exhale. Look in the mirror and check out the directions you're taking. Let life get quiet and listen to your own common sense. Of course your first steps into the world of enterprise need help. But not ANY help. You need help that builds your own possibilities, not the possibilities of people out to steal your dreams.

Far too often first timers take any help. They turn to the noisiest niche in the new biz world, multi level marketing. "You can get rich without selling", or "make money without risk". Followed by, "Hey Uncle Bert, have you been looking for a new, exciting opportunity".

Don't do it. Multilevel marketing is the essence of "any help". It's no help. It's worse than no help, because you can do so much better on your own, on a path blessed by your own good thoughts and fixing problems in the world that actually need fixing.

I'd intended to explore multilevel marketing in one of these posts, when a good friend linked me to a blog by Ramit Sethi. Mr. Sethi is a very good young writer and recent Stanford grad. His blog, subtly named, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich" focuses on "personal finance and personal entrepreneurship for college students, recent grads, and everyone else."

Personal entrepreneurship for college students and recent grads... Yikes, somebody please buy Mr. Sethi a cup of coffee (not the cheap stuff - make it McDonalds) and give him my best. College students and recent grads REALLY need to learn the stuff of new and emerging enterprises. The world REALLY needs college students and recent grads to get their enterprise asses in gear and fix this place for their own benefit and the generations that succeed us.

Mr. Sethi is a person of Indian ancestry. I hope that it’s then OK for him to title his Nov. 14, 2006 post “Why I Hate Indian Network Marketers So Much.”

He’s not picking on Indian people, but using his personal knowledge of the ways scammers exploit people by maliciously utilizing cultural seams.

With Mr. Sethi’s post, you get a nice overview of the different types of multilevel scams out there. You get a short case study, some precise and funny analysis, and finally, a great set of rules to live by when considering this pathway of multilevel marketing: Ramit’s 5 Maxims of Network Marketing.

Two of the biggest tragedies multilevel marketing inflicts on the wonderful folks who have summoned their resolve and subscribed to the leap are highlighted by Mr. Sethi. First, is the distraction from your real goals. Second, and most important, is the cultural and spiritual misuse of enterprise creation that can deflate your ambitions and waste your abilities.

Here’s s good piece from his post:

”These programs are a scam on your time and your relationships. Yes, there are exceptions and a few people make lots of money. But dig into the data and you'll discover that most people--and I mean that statistically--most people make less than $100/month. Most people don't last very long, either. "But Ramit," you might say, naively, "how can it hurt? If I can make $50/month, what's wrong with that? PS I think I can actually make $50,000/month!!!"

There are four things wrong with that: First, you won't make that much. Second, you're not creating any lasting value or building a skill set for you. Third, have you seen how friends treat you if you try to turn your friendship into a sales relationship? And fourth, engaging in these stupid "opportunities" distracts you from real entrepreneurship and your goals.”

It was a cool recent grad that brought this blog to my attention. She reads Mr. Sethi all the time. I would pass along his link to anyone, but I would especially recommend his writing to young folks.

We need you in the game young people. Don’t take “any help”. Look for contributions that you can make, then build sustainable commercial pathways to get there.

The antithesis of sustainable work is multilevel marketing. Don’t do it. My thanks to Mr. Sethi for defining it so well.

You’re smart enough. There are plenty of problems to fix. Common sense and hard work rule. Go get ‘em my young friends!

Ramit Sethi’s blog

Wikipedia info on multilevel marketing

MLMwatch.org Lots of good links shining lights on multilevel marketing scams. A private site run by Stephen Barrett, MD

Labels: innovation, marketing, multilevel marketing, startups

My Dad is an inventor. A Chemical Engineer by training, his passion is for problems and blank pieces of paper.

My Mom is wonderful. She has strengths and insights I can’t begin to count here, but she is not an inventor. At 50 something, I’m still growing up with this lovely family wrapped around me.

When I call my folks, Mom usually answers. Dad is usually working. When the ebb and flow of their family life seems to be on divergent courses, I can hear it coming quickly. I can count on Mom to summarize all her thoughts about my Dad’s imperfections, flaws and unfamiliar behaviors with just one word. I see the word coming, inexorably as the little pleasantries get covered. It’s a word not usually associated with venom. It’s a pretty neutral word. An unemotional, technical word,

Except in my family, and in lots of naysayer corners of the world.

To get Mom’s version right, you have to say this word as though it gave you a disease, or say it as though you were spitting out something unpleasant. Are you feeling surly? Good. The word? Prototypes. As in “Your Father is making (there are spiders in my mouth) prototypes.”

It’s good to be on the phone for these conversations because Mom can’t see me smiling. Of course he’s making prototypes. He has to. That’s where change comes from.

The Nov/Dec ’06 MIT Technology Review has a great article by James Surowiecki summarizing the work of an endeavor called One Laptop per Child (OLPC), and its evangelist Nicholas Negroponte. The core of the idea is to create a partnership of seemingly disparate parties, fuse in some technologies that barely exist and work out distribution channels in ways that seem counterproductive.

Prototypes. Squared and cubed. God I wish I was there.

Mr. Negroponte and OLPC are working out details omnidirectionally to get $100 computers into the hands of millions of the world’s poorest children.

They’re probing the world’s realities to find a seam that will work. The technology designs make me shiver. Self powered, drop ‘em on rocks computers that can link every kid in a dirt floor classroom together, as well as to the global internet. It’s a really cool story. Good on ya guys. Make no small plans.

The discussions swirling around this project are interesting, and well illuminated in the OLPC article.

There’s lots of criticism of the plan. It hasn’t been done before. Global norms of common understanding aren’t in place. Bureaucracies are confused. Lefties don’t like it. Righties don’t like it. Spit with me kids, prototypes.

Much of the criticism seems to focus on the fact that resources for the poor should first be directed at the areas of greatest need.

I like the historical perspective from the OCPL article. Andrew Carnegie amassed a fortune in the 1800s that he turned toward building free libraries. He did this at a time when few libraries even existed, and the ones that did charged fees, and had few books to circulate. No one even considered that poor people should have access to these libraries. They had bigger problems.

So Mr. Carnegie went around what people considered normal. He created resources where none had previously existed. He found his own money could leverage public monies. He worked out commercial paths that were counterintuitive, yet repeatable.

Of course the criticism grew.

“… in fact, in many of the towns where he built libraries, citizens grumbled that their tax dollars should be going to something that really mattered.. Yet in the long run, one would be hard pressed to say that either Carnegie or the taxpayers wasted that money, because the social benefits of disseminating knowledge are so immense.”

Much of what One Laptop per Child proposes is tricky. Some of it may not stick. Good. Better than good. It’s great. Their striving will open new and unexpected paths for all of us. We will learn from their hard work what works and more importantly, what doesn’t work and why. We’ll be indebted to every failure and celebrating every success.

It’s the unconventional enterprise models that OLPC is creating that I find inspiring. They are not directing resources. They’re creating new resources to let people make their own lives better. They’re working to find non traditional paths to distribute those resources so those in need can make their own decisions.

You can do this in your own way, on your own path, with your own plan. Throw yourself heartily at one problem. Work to create resources where they don’t exist. The best part about making something new is that there are very few rules. Don’t expect all of it to stick. Just keep making prototypes.

Then repeat the ones that stick.

Thanks Dad.


One Laptop per Child

MIT Technology Review. Hard copy edition of the Nov/Dec cover is a close up of an OLPC computer overlaid with this title: Will This Save the World? The $100 Laptop. Mr. Surowiecki's article is titled: Philanthropy's New Prototype.

wiki info about James_Surowiecki author of the The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. A very interesting book I highly recommend.

Labels: innovation

Great enterprises of all shapes and sizes develop around great stories.

As you proceed outbound on your own enterprise path, first find your own story. Don't look for a story you can sell people. No one wants to be sold.

People want to join, to participate actively in great stories. We are all looking for ways to make our own lives and our own enterprises better. Great stories are tales of solution.

Among the best enterprise stories I know is that of Mr. Tim Kehoe, the colored bubbles guy from St. Paul, MN. Tim's 11 years of persistent experimentation led this past year to the development of a valuable new chemistry, but more fun, of course, are the brightly colored bubbles he's invented. See my post from Nov. 19, linked below, for the full story.

To help close out this year, I'd like to thank Tim once again for his patience, his durability, and most of all, for one hell of a great story. I'd also like to point to some good news and good publicity Tim and friends have received lately.

Popular Science Magazine, which first ran with this story, has just awarded Tim and his colored bubbles with their Grand Award for General Innovation for 2005. Congrats, friends!

I also heard a nice interview on NPR's Morning Edition with Tim about his story. You'll like hearing it directly.

Tim started last year with some new investors, a lot of great ideas, and plenty of unfinished problems with his colored bubbles.

Less than a year later, he's a national innovation award winner, and we'll soon all be joining his story.

You too can create a great story. Look for it in what you're most passionate about.

The rest of us are waiting to join in.



Zubbles! Home of the colored bubbles. Their web site gets better all the time. There is a video on line now.

NPR audio interview with Tim Kehoe

Pop Sci Grand Award Winner for General Innovation, 2005

From the kitchen sink: A great tale of innovation My original post about Tim and colored bubbles. 11/19/05

Think that's Tim in the bubble's reflection above? Colored bubble photo above borrowed from NPR.

Labels: diversions, entrepreneurship, innovation

Fortune Magazine, running major sections on sustainability. They've been hipping up old Fortune lately. Lots of titans probably spinning in their gilding at the thought.

The December 12 issue had a special section with a number of articles about sustainability and enterprise.

It opened like this: "Without any fanfare the sustainability movement is gaining powerful momentum. The concept is simple: Economic development, if carried out in a careful manner, can proceed without exhausting the natural resources needed by future generations. While conservation and development often seem at odds, corporations are realizing that they can employ eco-friendly strategies while running and growing their businesses."

I'm not going to paper over the fact that there are rogue enterprises rooting up the commons. If you were to go 1,000 years in both directions from now you'll find rogue enterprises rooting up the commons.

However, civilized types have been growing smarter and more sustainable economies and societies throughout history. It's our duty to not only defend the commons, but to grow it. Creating smarter, helpful, sustainable enterprises is a part of all that.

While the Fortune article focuses on large organizations benefiting from smart less-waste strategies, so can we all. In fact, there are a zillion small, smart enterprises that can be grown and developed by the rest of us in support of this strategy.

You want an idea for starting your own enterprise? Follow that lead.

Find a specialty that helps specific target customers get smarter about their enterprises. Get great at that specialty. Identify a core market of precisely focused end users.

I recommend setting up your enterprise to sell to other enterprises. I strongly believe that it's much easier and more rational to make and sell stuff to other enterprises than civilians. While your vendors should be eclectic as hell, your customers should be filtered carefully.

There are many, many enterprises within your reach that could benefit by the addition of smarter, more sustainable technologies. Make one of these tools or processes the thing you're great at. Specifically for (you fill in the blank) type enterprises and organizations. Find a technology niche, a set of tools, or a proprietary process you can reproduce inexpensively then fire it off with rifle barrel accuracy at just the customers you choose.

Breakthroughs don't have to come in extra large sizes. Breakthroughs can mean a few percent more efficiency someplace. Breakthroughs are processes done safer. Breakthroughs can come in all manner of shapes and sizes and levels of recognition. If you can help other enterprises produce their work with less waste, you've got the start of a sustainable business model.

That’s my pitch. Done over a number of enterprises, repeat-ably, throughout your network, you make a living and the whole place gets better.

Get really smart about something that helps. Search it out in magazines about stuff you already love. That’s a big help, as love can sustain you (for a short while) during times of bad cash flow. Don’t push this though. Analogies don't pay the bills.

The Fortune article quoted, “To Andrew Savitz, a Boston-based consultant who specializes in environmental and sustainability issues, there’s been a tipping point in one area after another, in which 'business and societal interests are clearly seen as intersecting'. He calls them ‘sustainability sweet spots’.”

Mr. Savitz goes on to report how Toyota bet its future on rising awareness of environmental performance in all walks of life. They are about to become the world’s largest auto maker. Figure it out.

You don’t have to develop hybrid engines, though I encourage that if you’ve got the stuff. You can make the world better in tiny incremental steps. That’s how most of what makes the planet grow happens anyway. Unnoticed hard work, getting it done better, little by little.

Your neighborhood is only limited by the internet.

Get smart about something helpful then go be helpful. Keep good notes and, among the right company, never pass up a chance to sell.

Come on in. The water’s fine. Your enterprise life awaits.


Fortune Magazine


Andrew Savitz works from Boston as a partner in PriceWaterhouse-Coopers' environmental sustainability business services practice. I can't locate a link to him but here's the PwC front door PriceWaterhouse-Coopers

Labels: entrepreneurship, green tech, innovation, startups

Those funny folks at MIT's Technology Review have some great headline writers.

One story, plucked from the back of my desk, is about a cool new idea for improving weather forecasting.

Right now all the data from the lower atmosphere in the US is gathered by just 69 weather balloons each taking only two readings per day. Amazing.

The July 2005 issue of Technology Review reports that newly developed sensors are being affixed to commuter aircraft to gather and transmit meteorological data in real time.

"The amount of data we're getting is just incredible", says a National Weather Service meteorologist. With this kind of data loop, forecasting ground conditions and precipitation is now becoming accurate to the minute.

Pretty simple idea, though surely long, arduous and exciting in getting it here.

In the world of innovation, there will forever be an unlimited supply of low hanging fruit. Please note.

However, my real love for this story comes from the poetry of a great headline. Ready? Here's how TR wrote it...

Proclaiming Rain Falls Mainly to a Plane



Technology Review Magazine. This small article is not linked. See hard copy July 2005.

NOAA's Great Lakes Fleet Experiment. Great links to the history and technolgy behind this story.

AirDat, the company processing the sensor data

Labels: diversions, innovation

I guarantee you will remember the first time you see colored bubbles.

Bubbles that kids blow, except well, blown into spectacular colors. Technicolor bubbles. A zillion pixels per inch colored bubbles. Hot pink bubbles. Neon green bubbles. Yellow and orange bubbles. And when they pop, the color and the magic disappear until you do it again. And again. And again.

Colored bubbles will be on the market early next year. And you doubted that the world is getting better...

My report from the world of invention and innovation this week leaves me slack jawed and thunderstruck with admiration.

I'd never thought of a SustainableWork Hall of Fame, but I've decided to invent one just for Tim Kehoe. I'm making Tim the first endowed chair of kitchen sink innovation. Emeritus Professor.